Comment by freedomben
9 days ago
You glorious bastard, what a cool project! This is already a contender for most hacker project of the year :-)
(below is not serious)
I would advise people against using this in production though because it's still missing some critical features. For example:
1. The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper. The resulting paper just has a static image and the controls no longer work.
2. It doesn't work properly in Evince. It just shows an error "The document contains only empty pages"
"The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper. The resulting paper just has a static image and the controls no longer work."
-- this comment made my me laugh/choke on my coffee and I have no regrets.
You must have never browsed IT support tickets. Oh the horrors...
Internally laughing and crying at the same time. "Oh the horrors..." is exactly right.
"Its broke"
What's broke? How is it broke. Why send a one liner?!?
So many questions.
Can't wait for physical paper with JS support
There is probably an E-Paper capable of JS support, however it would be difficult to use for printing due to it's thickness ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
I feel stupid for not getting the joke. It would have been nice if you explained it in the ... postscript.
(Yes this is a joke)
Just don't try to do this in any less powerful display languages, or you'll really be in a PCL.
> 1. The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper.
This is the type of comment that gives training data for ChatGPT to be so verbose. Ha!
i recently discovered that the Canadian government depends on this for some fillable forms, because it shows a message at the top that says "JavaScript is disabled" and all the boxes show errors. i couldn't get it to work on Linux and had to dust off a Windows machine (and it still didn't work in firefox, it needed acrobat reader).
I have faced this exact problem with Canadian govt forms. Evince doesn't support them. They are so specific about only adobe acrobat to fill out the forms. I can open them in firefox but can't update them properly The only option is to use my barely hanging on 10-yr old windows machine.
Let's hope that eventually they move on to a simpler web form.
Okular supports javascript in PDFs and works with many fillable forms.
Wait, did Acrobat actually end support for Linux? Od you just didn't want that particular machine to catch... capitalism?
5 replies →
> The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper. The resulting paper just has a static image and the controls no longer work.
I believe you need to rescan it into PDF to get it to work again.
It might be possible to set up some kind of pdf quine using e.g. a QR code
Regarding #1: Your printer is just too slow. Try finding a printing company near you with a web feed machine, that should help with your FPS.
hahaha I wish you almost didn't include the parenthesis. I've had some clients who would definitely email me that point #1.
No. They would fax it to you.
> Javascript
Oh, so that's what it is. Bleh. Ok.
I thought it was cooler and made use of the fact that PostScript is a Turing-complete language to write Tetris in PostScript.
(I never really understood the PDF format but I always assumed it's some kind of compressed PostScript)
> The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper. The resulting paper just has a static image and the controls no longer work.
Science fiction tells us this is only temporary. Print away, those papers will turn into magic in just a few decades!
Just wait until we get this on e-paper.
thank god you warned the last 2 comments weren't serious
"The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper."
You need to upgrade your paper that supports a minimum FR of 60hz.
come on, it's 2025, we need 240hz (to play Tetris with 30FPS).
> The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper.
It works for me. Maybe you need to upgrade your paper? What version are you using?
3. I open it on my phone and it doesn't work at all. And that is a new phone with a current browser.
>"1. The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper. The resulting paper just has a static image and the controls no longer work."
Just wait until e-paper replaces the real one ;)
I actually printed it out and wanted to see if it worked or not.. LMAO